Telling stories with pictures: narrative in middle and late Byzantine monumental painting

Abstract

This article explores the narrative strategies employed in the monumental painting of the middle and late Byzantine period and considers whether the different methods of narration and the degree of narrativity can reveal anything about the function of the work, its creators, its audience and finally its period; in other words whether a narratological approach to visual representation could be a tool for analysing a work of art in socio-historical terms. This is determined firstly by identifying similar narrative structures in contemporary literature and secondly by looking for information on how contemporary viewers ‘read’ the ‘story’ in monumental narrative paintings.